Streamlining HPC Workloads with Containers

In this video from the Container Camp UK 2016, Dustin Kirkland from Canonical presents: Streamlining HPC Workloads with Containers.

“One might find it ironic that some of the world’s fastest supercomputers — vast clusters capable of trillions of floating point operations per second — can take upwards of a half an hour to reboot in between jobs. While we often talk about the density advantages of containers, it’s the opposite approach that we use in the High Performance Computing world! Here, we use exactly 1 system container per node, giving it unlimited access to all of the host’s CPU, Memory, Disk, IO, and Network. And yet we can still leverage the management characteristics of containers — security, snapshots, live migration, and instant deployment to recycle each node in between jobs. In this talk, we’ll examine a reference architecture and some best practices around containers in HPC environments.”

Dustin Kirkland is Cloud Product Manager at Canonical, part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Product and Strategy team. Dustin is responsible for the technical strategy, road map, and life cycle of the Ubuntu Cloud and IoT commercial offerings.

Container Camp is the community conference on the future of software containers. “We bring the best technologists in the world together for one day of incredible original talks.”

Comments

Canonical made great progress on their container story over the last 1 year. Within the HPC community there is growing interest towards containers and Canonical is demonstrating how their LXD containers can be used in the HPC context. LXD offers a method to achieve VM like features (such as backup / restore and pause) without the performance overhead.

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